Small Talk

28 . the fine art of small talk
because of his initiation of small talk. “When I was much
younger, nineteen or twenty, attending the University of
Oregon, I worked part-time for a couple of years at the
local hospital. My job title was prep tech, and my role
was to prepare the male surgical patients for surgery,
which included shaving them. As you can imagine, this
was a difficult job for me as well as the patient. I began
my workday at four thirty a.m., so it was usually very
early when I was prepping my first patient. I would
spend as much as an hour or more with each one. The
shaving itself was difficult and physically uncomfortable.
The patients were hungry, oftentimes in pain, and
weirded out by having another man shave them. Many
were very sick, facing mortal fears. An open-heart prep
required shaving a person one hundred percent from chin
to ankles. Hopefully, I’ve painted the situation as difficult.
“But I soon discovered that everything would go a
thousand times better if I engaged them in small talk. I
found that they relaxed, and that the time went by much
faster if I could draw them out of the moment. We didn’t
talk about their health or their fears or politics or sports,
but just general, easy stuff, like where they lived, what it
was like there, where they were from originally, things
like that.